🌱 After the Weeds: Spring Equinox, Shame, and the Tender Soil of Becoming

This past week, as the earth tilted us gently toward longer days, a client brought something into the room that’s stayed with me.

We were speaking about shame—how it lives in the body, how it gets braided into our sense of self, how it distorts the way we see others and ourselves. She described it as a kind of overgrowth in her inner world: a dense mat of weeds that made it hard to move, hard to breathe.

And then she said something quietly:

“I’ve spent so long pulling up the weeds… now I don’t know what comes next.”

She was realising that so much of her life—and her therapy—has been about noticing the subtle, relentless ways shame shows up and working to clear it. But now, having done such deep work, she feels a kind of lostness. What does it mean to

tend the garden after the weeds are gone? Which seeds will thrive in this new soil? Is it okay to plant something that feels right for now, even if it doesn’t last?This wondering opened up such rich ground in our session—around patience, experimentation, and the slow work of becoming.

Because we don’t talk enough about what happens after the weeding.

So much therapeutic work (and inner work) focuses on what needs to be removed—shame, outdated narratives, survival strategies that once kept us safe. The clearing is necessary. But in that space after the clearing—when the weeds have been uprooted and we’re left with bare, disrupted soil—there is often pain. And grief. And exposure. That unsettled ground is part of the process.

It’s tempting to rush to the replanting stage. To replace shame with pride. Fear with boldness. Emptiness with vision. And sometimes we do plant things—new ideas, identities, longings. But they don’t always take root. Or they bloom briefly and wither.

The truth is, cleared soil is not yet healthy soil.

Especially when it’s been stripped, neglected, or tangled for a long time. Especially when the weeds weren’t just weeds—they were protection. Familiarity. Even comfort.

Rebuilding the soil takes time. It takes compost—a slow breakdown of what was, metabolised into something fertile. It takes patience to learn what this new ground needs—moisture, minerals, boundaries, rest. And it takes discernment to know which seeds are worth tending. Not everything we plant is meant to grow.

This is the deeper medicine of the Spring Equinox.

Yes, it’s about new beginnings. But it’s also about balance—equal light and dark. The courage to sit with what’s been pulled out, and what’s been left behind. The willingness to let the ground be bare for a while.

In this session, we stayed with that bare ground. We tracked the grief that emerged when the shame was named and loosened. We noticed the impulse to cover it up with new plans, and instead just paused. Sat in the disruption. Let the nervous system feel that unsettledness—without rushing to solve it.

And when we spoke of the Equinox, it wasn’t a metaphor for transformation alone—it was a reminder that balance is fragile, cyclical, and sacred. That light doesn’t mean clarity right away. That healing is sometimes less about knowing what’s next, and more about learning how to stay with the exposed earth.

So as the season shifts, I offer this:

🌿 What weeds have you been brave enough to pull?

🌿 What has the disturbance revealed in your internal landscape?

🌿 What does your soil need—not to produce, but to restore?

Maybe the work now is not in the planting.

Maybe it’s in the tending of ground that’s finally free.

With warmth,

Stephanie